"Welcome To The World" will not take on OTAs
It’s no secret that like everyone else everywhere in the world, online travel agencies (OTAs) too have struggled to cope this year with the plummet of airline and hotel bookings. In the midst of all this gloom and doom comes news of a new platform – ‘Welcome To The World’ (WTTW), which will promote direct hotel bookings whilst entirely leaving out the payment of any commissions whatsoever by hotels.
Stefanie Schachtschabel, founder of ‘Welcome To The World’ claims, “Being the world’s first customer – generated video platform we mobilise stakeholders to jointly promote destinations”. Explaining further, “Designed to boost direct bookings, Welcome to the world is eliminating commissions and giving back the power to the travel and tourism industry”.
What this signifies is that WTTW, which debuted in Dubai recently, will not take on board those aggregators who doubled up as middlemen to claim as much as 25 percent commission from hotels and that’s something which many consumers are unaware of. Many consumers are also perhaps unaware that the commissions paid by hotels to aggregators are built into the hotel room rate – meaning the end-user, i.e. the consumer pays for it.
What a difference a word makes
When WTTW changed the “Book’’ button on its site to “Book Direct”, it put back the power of bookings into the hands of tourism product owners, from restaurants to hotels and from small businesses to luxury properties. Unsurprisingly, this approach was met with some incredulity- because it went against the grain and ran contrary to the rules of the bookings game.
Stefanie adds, “Welcome To The World has no intention to start a fight with OTAs. We are really our own entity”, she says, “We are not planning to go to war with any OTA. It all about giving the consumer another choice to be inspired by destinations and to be educated to book directly and we’ll give them benefits”.
For the traveler, the benefits were obvious: trust and practicality. No one knows their businesses like these product owners do, and that means that travelers get to benefit from insider knowledge through a direct connection that allows them to access to the people best-suited to answering the questions that’ll optimize their experiences.
Elaborating how the world has changed, and the ways in which we now explore it, the founder of “Welcome To The World” contends that an increasingly well-prepared and savvy consumer isn’t someone to underestimate, but to embrace, and new attitudes to travel have the potential to move the industry in a direction that benefits travelers and providers alike. Whatever the future takes us, we’re confident that our current era isn’t an end to travel as we know it – it’s the beginning of a transformation.
In lieu of any commissions on bookings, Schachtschabel’s platform stays live thanks to an additional service available to hoteliers. For a fixed annual fee, hotels can gain access to her deep knowledge of digital marketing, where she will help them devise various online campaigns. She explained, “we are redirecting the consumers from our site so we don’t have a high cost thing. But we have a membership-driven model, so hotels can use our platform complimentary, but we’re also there to help them revitalize their video content or develop year-long digital marketing campaigns.
Already, leading hotels in the Emirates, such as those under the Hilton brands and the Ritz-Carlton have adopted the platform.
HSL News Release
|
|
|
|
